Mad Max: Feminist Road

"It looked like a straight-up guy flick" whines one misogynist website. "This is the vehicle by which they are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat." Thus complain the detractors of Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller's brilliant new post-apocalyptic action revival, which has drawn criticism from anti-feminists for, quite literally, setting the patriarchy on fire. In a world decimated by nuclear war, the collapsed remnants of civilisation are plagued by warlords who seek to control the few resources left (primarily water and women). The stark, howling desert has bred a disease of violent hyper-masculinity, the sort of fevered dream the above reviewers might fantasise about. The greatest wish of the crazed 'war boys' is to die in battle, the only purpose for women is as breeding stock.

The fact that the film itself is so enjoyable and fun, with excellent performances, special effects and writing, goes a long way to stoke the anger of those calling for its boycott; they are afraid the explosions and cars will brainwash the unwitting common man into swallowing the film's feminist message. Playwright and author of 'The Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler was drafted in to consult on the film, and what results is a story where female characters are not defined by their relationship to the hero, where the young and vulnerable fight with equal strength alongside the elderly. It is egalitarian in every sense, and the male characters who accept this succeed, while the bloodthirsty patriarchs who refuse to accept it meet their inevitable end in flames.

The tensions of Mad Max lie not in whether humanity will survive the apocalyptic catastrophe, but whether we will survive each other. The themes of ownership of women's bodies, of society descending into chaos and environmental collapse are sadly those which extend out of fictional worlds into our own, making the film, and its promotion of equality, all the more important today. As I went to close my browser window, a pitiful pop up ad from the website promised me 'an online dating profile that gets you laid.' These men are unashamed about the fact that they want to live without women, but not without sex. One would do well to take a better message away from Mad Max: that we all must learn to live together, because survival depends upon it.